[kepler-dev] bioKepler 1.1 released

[Daniel Crawl]

We are pleased to announce the release of bioKepler 1.1.

The bioKepler suite facilitates rapid development and scalable
distributed execution of bioinformatics workflows in Kepler while
simplifying access to a wide range of bioinformatics tools executed
locally or distributedly. bioKepler contains a set of Kepler actors,
called "bioActors", which are specialized for running bioinformatics
tools along with Kepler directors for distributed data-parallel
(DDP) execution on Big Data platforms such as Hadoop and Spark.

bioKepler 1.1 includes the following new features since 1.0:

   - Support for Apache Spark (http://spark.apache.org) and Hadoop 2
   - DDP Director supporting multiple execution platforms
   - Execution of DDP workflows in the same JVM as Kepler
   - Token input/output formats to directly transfer data between
     Kepler workflows and Big Data platforms
   - and many bug fixes

bioKepler 1.1 can be installed using the Module Manager in Kepler
2.4. If you have an older version of Kepler, we recommend that you
first download and install Kepler 2.4, and then use the Module
Manager to install bioKepler 1.1. Kepler 2.4 can be downloaded from
the Kepler website (https://kepler-project.org/users/downloads).
bioKepler is built on top of the DDP, provenance, reporting, and
workflow run manager modules, and does not require a separate
installation of these modules.

The bioKepler website (http://www.biokepler.org) provides more
information about the project including the bioKepler User Guide
and descriptions of the bioActors and demo workflows.

We are building virtual machine images with bioKepler 1.1 for Amazon
EC2 and OpenStack. These images are based on CloudBioLinux and
include many bioinformatics tools. A separate announcement will be
sent when the virtual machine images are completed.